Burning desire for home-grown up in smoke

High priestess Thalia Prokopiou holds a torch while rehearsing for the Olympic flame ceremony.
Picture: Reuters

As the Olympic torch moves around Greece and the Aegean at the start of a worldwide journey that will end at the opening ceremony of the 2004 Games in Athens on August 13, the flame is shedding a little light on a subject the Athens 2004 Organising Committee had hoped to keep hidden.

You see, the torch, perhaps the most potent symbol the Olympics has, a source of great national pride for the host, is not Greek. It is Australian.

And if that news now causes outrage among the people of Greece, it is a major embarrassment for AthOC, which ducked questions for two weeks before running out of excuses and reluctantly conceding that yes, it was true. The torch - or, rather, all 11,000 of them being used in the relay - was made in, and was supplied from, Australia.

In a bid to gather something from what looms as a PR disaster, Athens was quick to add that, hey, at least the torch was designed by a Greek, Andreas Varatsos, who took his inspiration from the shape of an olive leaf.

But you can get arguments about the meaning of "design", and the Athens claim cut no ice last week with Peter Mullinger, of the Department of Chemical Engineering at Adelaide University.

You can make the thing look as pretty as you like, he snorted, but a torch is not a torch unless it can carry a flame for a reasonable period, and do it in wind, rain and extreme temperatures.

It is the design of the innards that is important. And Australians did this, he said.

So much for Athens.

But AthOC did try to keep the lid on things. The contracts of the two Australian companies involved in the torch contained a clause obliging them to secrecy. In fact, they were told to say nothing more than "no comment" if inquisitive journalists contacted them.

The main player in the Australian triumph is a small Adelaide company, Fuel and Combustion Technology - which Professor Mullinger co-founded. In partnership with the Turbulence, Energy and Combustion Group at Adelaide University, FCT designed the combustion system. FCT built and supplied the torches.

"No comment," was the answer when FCT was asked if it was involved. Either that, or chief executive Con Manias was the only person authorised to speak and he was overseas. In Athens? "No." Of course, he was.

An old family metal-pressing company in Sydney, G.A. and L. Harrington, made the torch casings - and for two weeks would say only "no comment". The same players were responsible for the Sydney 2000 torches.